How might the shape of a history of AIDS help us to rethink processes of globalization? This talk, inspired by a new wave of critical AIDS scholarship, seeks to answer this question by tracing the lived realities of the epidemic in the Global South and Global North. It does so by exploring both the global governance of AIDS and the local particularities of AIDS epidemics, activism, and state interventions in such key sites as South Africa, Uganda, the United States, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.

Patrick Kelly is a Buffett Institute Postdoctoral Fellow with a doctorate in History from the University of Chicago. He researches and teaches broadly across modern global history, and is particularly interested in how and why people, ideas, and diseases cross national borders. This interest shaped his first book, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge, 2018), which examines the intersection of Latin American and global human rights politics since the 1970s.

The Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium brings together an interdisciplinary audience to build awareness of global research on campus. This series promotes dialogue on scholarship and develops a deeper sense of community among Buffett Institute affiliates. Each meeting lasts one hour; lunch is provided. Due to space constraints, we will not admit attendees once the space reaches capacity.